The Mountain Glen I'll Seek At Morning Early
by Nagia
Summary: One woman dies. How many more suffer? An exploration of consequences.


Eyes the color of tarnished copper sparkle as she throws her head back and laughs at him. There's engine grease on her nose, and he's sure some made it past the junction of glove and skin, to streak across her wrist.

"Hiro," she says, "I'm almost done."

He tells her: "It's getting dark."

"I'll finish sooner if you go." She laughs again, and says, "Let me work! I want some time with Asami before her bedtime."

Dinner, of course, is long over. He takes one last look at her blueprints and goes.

* * *

If the machines were quiet, it was almost impossible to tell when the Equalists were moving. The sound of glass breaking, a hiss of released air, and sometimes the buzzing-shattering noise of the lightning rods. After that came meaty thumps as people hit the floor.

Then the dragging noises.

Tonight, they heard a machine walk down the street. It smashed a neighbor's garden.

Father grabbed both him and his sister — even though his sister couldn't bend, or maybe couldn't bend yet — and pushed them into the cellar. Jun looked up in the darkness, seeing nothing, as the bolt slid home.

Mother usually swept a rug back over the old trap door.

The cellar smelled like horseraddish.

Father and Mother didn't even have to warn them to be quiet anymore.

* * *

Nurse brings Asami to him. She holds Nurse's hand tightly. Her eyelids droop, but she widens her eyes to try and stay awake.

"Mrs. Sato hasn't come home yet?"

Only Nurse could make that question sound mildly reproachful.

"Fixing some details in the workshop," he says, waving a hand. "Is it bedtime?"

"I think so," says Nurse.

* * *

Lan's younger brother, Bao, was the first to see it. He came dashing back to the family as if platypus bears were chasing him.

"Grandpa Ru! Grandpa Ru, your shop!"

There was no choice but to follow Bao after that. At first all she saw was glass. Someone had broken the windows of every shop on the street, and shards littered the road so thickly that Satomobiles couldn't pass.

After that, she saw crushed wood and fragments of brass. Not only had they broken every window on the street, they'd found the time to drag out every single phonograph and smash it. Even the very first phonograph Grandpa Ru had bought, the one he kept high on the shelf in the back room, not for touching.

Somoene had painted 平 on the storefront, where Grandpa Ru's sign had been.

It was her father who said, "Ukaleq, they know you're —"

"Oh, Father," her mother said. "I'm so sorry. You'll all be safer if I just go back south."

"Nonsense," said Grandpa Ru. "I can start over. My father wasn't afraid in Omashu. I won't be afraid here."

Lan didn't say anything at all. Republic City seemed like a very good place to be afraid. Grandpa Ru was getting too old to just start over fresh. Who was buying phonographs right now, anyway? Only a terrible child would say any of that.

And only a worse one would wish that her waterbender mother _would_ just leave town, because maybe if she did, they really would be safer.

* * *

Lin Beifong herself appears at his doorstep at the break of dawn. Two of her metalbender police officers stand behind her.

The house staff retreat to unobtrusive listening places. He's employed them long enough to know that they'll keep their ears open.

"Mr. Sato," Beifong beings.

The thoughts build, and build, and build, and the feelings with them, until they're a knot in his throat. He has to swallow — and again — in order to ask: "What's happened?"

"I'm sorry for your loss. PLainclothes officers are scouring the city for traces of... her belongings as we speak."

"What _happened_?"

Beifong presses her lips together, draws in a breath, and says, "It would appear a mugging. At least one firebender was involved."

* * *

Two masked chi-blockers brought Chen home. He'd been gone three days, but Li Mei eventually figured out that they brought him home the morning after. She looked closely at him, but beyond the shadows under his eyes, she saw nothing _wrong_ with him.

If she filled his plate, he ate. If she filled his glass, he drank. If she left him in his room, he slept.

In the sitting room, he sat and stared. He watched their pet owl-kitten climb her fabric tree, huge floppy ears lost amidst a swirl of cheap scarves. He watched the sand garden — forever immobile, forever frozen on his last message.

He did not go near the back garden. Never once looked in the direction of the rock sculpture that had won him a bet.

* * *

One silver chain, broken. Six pearls. One ring, gold, set with topaz. One ring, silver, set with green jasper.

Missing are fourteen pearls, two green jasper eardrops, her coinpurse (containing seventy-five yuons), and at first Hiroshi thinks half her face. But no, it's there; he traces his fingers across the melted, misshapen lumps on the left side of her head and tries not to think about what was once an eye, a brow, a cheek.

* * *

"You —" she said, driving the gear forward and trying not to think of Mako, of Korra, of Bolin, of the entire streets deprived of power and the shattered shops and the screaming children, "really are a—"

Glass crunched. Metal screamed louder than she ever could.

* * *

But blood for blood without remorse  
I've taken at Oulart Hollow  
And laid my true love's clay-cold corpse  
Where I full soon may follow

— Robert Dwyer Joyce, "The Wind That Shakes The Barley"


End file.
